Life Lessons, Personal Development, Self-Knowledge

The 21 Most Important Questions Of Your Life

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21 questions

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from reading books, interviewing smart people, and having conversations with my mentors is that questions are more important than answers. But that goes against everything you learn in school where you’re rewarded for the quality of your answers.

However, that’s not what you should judge a person on. Instead, look at the quality of a person’s questions, like Voltaire famously said:

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

And one of my friends who’s a consultant at one of the big three management consultancies, once told me that, “my job is to be ignorant.” He was referring to Peter Drucker, arguably one of the greatest management consultants of all time, who said:

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Entrepreneurship, Personal Development

Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person

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Impatience

One of my mentors, an art dealer, taught me the pitfalls of impatience. He specializes in art from the middle ages. Last time we met, he showed me a part of his personal collection. Impressed by the size of the collection, I asked how long it took to accumulate everything.

He said “45 years,” and then he laughed when I looked surprised. He continued:

“This is not something you can buy in one go. It’s not like going to the IKEA. Accumulating anything worthwhile in life takes time. First, because you don’t have the money to buy everything at once. Second, not everything is always available. You must wait for the right opportunity.”

And waiting is one of the hardest things in life. But if you take a close look around you, you see many examples of people who waited for the right opportunity.

Take all the investors who bought stocks and real estate during the financial crisis that started in 2008. That recession lasted for several years. Recently, I spoke to someone who invested a big chunk of his assets in the stock market between 2009 and 2011.

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Procrastination, Productivity

How To Get Back On Track

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get back on track

Do you know that feeling of being in the zone? And that everything goes well? Everything seems to go well before something bad happens. And you need to get back on track. Let me give you a few examples of being in the zone:

  • You wake up early every day to hit the gym.
  • You write 500 words a day.
  • You make daily prospecting calls.
  • You journal profoundly, and never skip a day.
  • You don’t eat junk food.

And consequently, everything is going great in your life. Every productive person has been there. When you do the things you know you should do, you feel in control of your life.

Like Woody Allen says, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” And you’re showing up.

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Life Lessons, Self-Knowledge

How I Measure My Life

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You can easily measure a business by looking at the numbers. Turnover, profit, costs, employee churn, etc.

But how do you measure your life? There are no universal metrics to assess your life.

So it’s up to every person to create their own way to measure where they are in life.

Some do that by looking at how much they earn compared to their peers. Some look at how far they climbed the corporate ladder. Others measure themselves by how they look.

I have studied how the most successful thinkers of our time measure their lives. The answer is surprising. You rarely hear that successful people measure their life by the size of their bank account or any other conventional measure.

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